Genealogy

Genealogy, a concept given sociological currency by Frederick Nietzsche and revived by Michel Foucault, refers to the most important methodological innovation of the so-called poststructuralist tradition of French social theory of the late twentieth century. In Genealogy of Morals ([1887] 1927), Nietzsche executed his famous sociological investigation of the origins of European “moral prejudices.” At some risk, one might even call Nietzsche's essays on good and evil the first deconstruction of the classical vocabulary of modern culture. In effect, as he says at the opening of Genealogy of Morals, the concept of the Good owes, not to an essential goodness, but “to the good themselves, that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good.” By thus situating one of the modern world's most essentializing philosophical categories in the historical system of social stratification, Nietzsche may well have been the first implicit sociologist of culture.

Methodologically, a genealogy traces the elements of culture, including practices as well as concepts and norms, back to their origins in a historical social arrangement. In this respect, the origins are decidedly not first causes or any similarly abstract and reductive first principles of human agency. In this, it may be said that Nietzsche completed the work begun by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Kant, most notably, demonstrated that knowledge arises neither in synthetic experience nor in an analytic a priori. Rather, knowledge, like morality, is based on a synthetic process that has the effect of being a priori without being analytically abstract. In this sense, Kant went beyond the early modern debates between Cartesian rationalisms and Lockean empiricisms. Still, Kant did not take the final step toward an explicit sociology of thought or morality. His famous categorical imperative (to act as though one's moral practices were necessary for the good of the social commonwealth) was a backhanded way of preserving moral absolutes as if they were practically attainable by the reasonable judgments of the social actor. Nietzsche, a full century later, took the next step. Concepts, including moral ones, arise not in essential categories of the good, the true, or the beautiful but in the social hierarchies whereby historically specific versions of the concepts dominate.

Curiously, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals appeared in 1887, between the publications of two other great works of nineteenth-century skeptical social theory, that is, 20 years after the first volume of Marx's Capital (1867) and just more than a decade before Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899). Both Marx and Freud claimed, in their ways, to have perfected a robust critical method for diagnosing the hidden, prior existing origins of superficially apparent social forms and behaviors. Yet, both Marx and Freud remained faithful to the Enlightenment method of asserting the true or the good with reference to an (at least) quasi-transcendental principle. This is the effect of Marx's allegiance to value producing labor as the first principle of essential humanity and Freud's to the Ego as the protector of human reason between the moralizing demands of the Superego and the presocial impulses of the Id. By focusing sternly on the social origins of ideas, Nietzsche's genealogical method provided subsequent social philosophy with a powerful critical tool at the expense of sacrificing claims to positivist empirical or even analytically realist truths.

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